Patricio Guzmán’s The Pearl Button Elevates Documentary to Art

There’s a reason IFC’s documentary parody Documentary Now! is so excellent: We are living in a documentary moment, or maybe hour, suffering from documentary overload. Muckraking is one thing—and the other day I re-watched, for example, Blackfish, just to make certain it was as powerful as I remembered it—but there are an awful lot of docs that feel like talking heads slapped over archival footage. They are less like films, more like school reports.

Patricio Guzmán’s films are referred to as documentaries, but they strike me as something else altogether. A Guzmán film is the cinematic equivalent of a wandering, truth-chasing essay, essay being a word that, by the way, has its roots in words like testing and its Old French relative essayer, or “to try.” Guzmán tries things out, tests them, allowing us, in the process, to witness.

If we speak of his 2010 film Nostalgia for the Light in terms associated with documentaries, we might say that it is about the political assassinations of the Allende government, who were buried in unmarked graves in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, a moistureless valley floor where the astronomers of the world have built vast universe-examining telescopes. “Our humid planet has only one small patch of brown that has absolutely no humidity,” says Guzmán, who narrates. The telescopes look up, while around them, the families of those killed and buried in the desert dig and search for their hidden loved ones. The Atacama is, Guzmán has said, “a reservoir of the past,” with buried meteorites, the mummified remains of older cultures, and Augusto Pinochet’s victims. But Nostalgia is less a documentary on Pinochet’s crimes and more a meditation, on time and memory. We don’t view these things in his “documentary.” We are moved to witness.

His new film, The Pearl Button, can be said to be about Patagonia. But it is about Patagonia the way the Bible is a travel guide to the Middle East. Let’s just say it has to do with water—water as the stuff of life, as a way of life, as a means of living and traveling and connecting. And as a means of keeping alive a culture that, in the case of the indigenous Alacalufe and Yaghan, still have their languages, despite the evil imposed by colonial power.

As he weighs the meaning of water in a place he visited often as a boy, Guzmán considers the celestial origins of water and the 2,653-mile-long coastline of his native, ocean-ignoring Chile. The film is, in a word, gorgeous, and begins with the contemplation of a drop of water sealed in an ancient chunk of desert quartz—quartz found in the Atacama Desert, as it happens. (Guzmán has referred to this film as a companion to Nostalgia.) From the quartz we go into the universe, and then into Patagonia’s lush and icy archipelagos, the largest series of archipelagos in the world.

The Pearl Button is also work, work that Guzmán directs us through, in a near desperate but simultaneously stoic act, one that almost mocks the re-enactments of so many American news programs. Guzmán tries (à la the etymology of “essay”) to see the Pinochet government’s secret burials, their dozens and dozens of bodies dumped at sea. Seeing this is made nearly impossible by the fact that they were, in fact, not seen, were not witnessed. Nonetheless, Guzmán crafts a solution. It is a case of art as re-enactment, though not in the sense of a bunch of history buffs dressed in period clothing at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. It is re-enactment of place (the sea and its corrosive but life-making effects) rather than people. It is art at its primal function: to remember in order to move forward.

I am at risk at spoiling by saying any more, but questions here include, How do we remember what we could never have seen? And in terms of Chile’s relationship with the sea, how do maps matter? Part of The Pearl Button’s beauty is in precisely how hard the film tries—how hard it works to get to a new place, one beyond what is already written or, for the most part, not written. Reconciliation begins with a hard look at the truth, even when the truth has been swallowed up by the physical world. The physical world, in Guzmán’s view, is an archive itself, a repository of all our actions and maybe more.

In an interview a few years ago, Guzmán said that when he teaches a film class and asks what films inspires a classroom of students, he typically hears from a student who is inspired by Hitchcock and thus aspires to make horror films, as well as one who speaks of historical films and will go on to make the same. “And there’s always one or two, who, from the back of the room, tell you, ‘I want to make a film about the tree that’s in my backyard.’ That’s a documentarian,” he told the interviewer. “I mean, people who are fascinated with reality as it is. People who see dramatic elements in real situations, where things move. Filming those elements is making a documentary.” Water is an element, of course, one of the four big ones. It is nearly everywhere. It connects us all, to everything.
The Pearl Button is screening all week at IFC, and next month at selected theaters around the U.S.